'Art & Soul: Walking, with a line by your side

"What is in black on a white sheet stays on that sheet: there is no return, no retrieval."

— Sylvia Zumbach

Some years ago, when Doro and Melk Zumbach — close friends of ours from Switzerland — came to us in Chandigarh, they brought with them an uncommon gift: a drawing in black ink on a sheet of paper. "From Melk’s mother", Doro said. It was a lovely piece: delicate, almost fragile lines, that now converged upon one another and now moved away; spidery; breathing the air that was in the spaces between them. ‘Simi’, we were told, was the artist’s name, the family’s way of referring to Sylvia. At that time we had no awareness of her, never having heard the name in our part of the world. But that was not strange, for that small, picture-perfect land has surprises tucked away in all corners. Even the Swiss themselves keep discovering, judging from the witty title of an exhibition in Zurich held a long time ago: "The lady in my neighbourhood was (turned out to be) a painter", it read.

Reeds. By Sylvia Zumbach. Private collection, Switzerland

In the years that followed, we kept some kind of track of Sylvia’s work. But it was not until a few weeks ago, when we were in Switzerland with Doro and Melk, that I became aware of the full range of her oeuvre. This was through a whole, lavishly illustrated book on her, tracing her journey, drawing attention to the phases that she went through in her mind, carving out a place for herself in the rich and complex world of art. There was much to see in the book, and much to learn. The facts alone were absorbing in themselves: born in the Kanton of Zug some 80 years ago, she trained in art schools in Zurich and Luzern; married Othmar Zumbach, who taught classical languages like Greek and Latin but worked on constructing cimbali — cimbalo, in singular, an old and early version of the piano, a forerunner of that instrument, so to speak — in his spare time; started, when barely 22 years of age, a studio of her own where she worked with colleagues who were architects and photographers; and began to participate in group shows. Slowly, but surely, she came into her own. Among the earliest things she designed were quilts — precise, geometric patterns — that served not only as articles of use but also hung and displayed as textile hangings: artworks in their own right. But this gave way, with time, to her turning assuredly to making works on paper: brush drawings in Indian ink for the most part. The oil medium did not work for her, for she had an allergy to turpentine: but on paper she was prolific, and brilliant. Playing with lines — unpretentious but complex patterns — came naturally to her and she never tired of the ‘game’. Indian ink, intensely black in colour, was a great favourite, but she would occasionally turn to building what she called ‘towers’ of colour: seemingly casual but carefully worked out broad strokes with brush in different colours, one piled upon another. She even produced, from time to time, paintings in three-dimensions, if one can call them that: a pair of wooden cubes, for instance, one smaller than the other, with each surface covered with familiar, sparse and uneven lines in black on which small dots, knots on a branch as it were, in colour, appeared. There was no telling where her lines would take her, but no defined forms as such surfaced in her work. It was all completely, emphatically, abstract.

From top: Two wooden cubes; Square within a square; and Colour Tower. By Sylvia Zumbach. Private collection, Switzerland

This interested me greatly, this commitment to total abstraction. For one might have expected another painter to have had at least some interest in figuration. What is it that might have influenced Sylvia’s decision, then? I asked Melk, her son, the question, sitting him down one day while I was with him now.

He thought of it for a while, and then said something to the effect that she was always like this: thinking in abstract fashion. And that it did not surprise anyone in the family.

She read a great deal, saw a great deal of art coming from other cultures, including the Japanese and the Indian. When the urge to paint moved her, she would withdraw into her studio space, or into herself, and these things came out. There was a stillness about her that, while in their growing years, he and his siblings felt as they saw her work.

One got the sense, hearing him, and reading the two essays in the book on her, that there was a possible connection between her own work and the music that her husband was so immersed in, working on constructing his favourite instrument, the cimbalo. She said once to someone that it was not whole pieces of music, but single notes that he struck with the keys he was fashioning that held her captive.

For in these isolated notes, she found peace, warmth, depth, clarity; even freedom from angst, and, occasionally, dark rhythms. It had also something to do possibly with her early forays into carpet or quilt-making for, like in her drawings or painted works, there was in them an emphasis on linear design, flatness, rhythm.

Whatever the roots of her abiding interest in abstraction, there is in her work a sense of exquisite neatness, a refinement, which strikes one at sight.

One does not have to see in her wooden cubes a hint of their being giant dice for use in some cosmic boardgame being played out, or read in her lightly tinted drawings that suggest reeds bending in a benign breeze some reference to Japanese prints like those of Hokusai or Utamaro. They are simply there, in their own right.

The great Swiss painter, Paul Klee, once said, famously, that ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’. As far as Sylvia Zumbach is concerned, it would seem that she found the line walking and invited her into her home, and kept talking to her most of her own life, seated across a table

This article was published on October 19, 2014